RIP to the beguiling and funny Mary Tyler Moore,
passed on at 80. She was a significant and influential presence in my childhood, but that’s
only saying what most people of around my age who grew up watching TV can say.
Many of the encomia that have been offered to her since the
news of her death broke have focused, rightly, on how The Mary Tyler Moore Show pioneered the image of an independent
single woman. Important as this was, I think the show’s magic and originality ran
even deeper.
It wasn’t just that Moore’s
character, Mary Richards, was a career woman, or even that her career wasn’t
just something to do until a husband came along. The show depicted how Mary
Richards built, from her coworkers and her neighbors, a true family that was
entirely sufficient to a fulfilling life. This seems commonplace now—indeed, it’s
the basic dynamic of most sitcoms—but if there was an earlier TV series that
hinged on it, I can’t think of it.
There was no real sense that Mary Richards was a lonely
person. She wasn’t averse to marriage, but even if it never came along, the
lyrics of the theme song weren’t just a platitude—the pleasure of the series
was Mary’s discovery that love really was all around, and there really was no
need to waste it.
Time for one more 2016 list, Your Humble Narrator’s annual
rundown of the books I’ve read over the past year (as always, excluding newspaper
and magazine articles, short stories, poems, comic books, blogs, facebook
posts, shopping lists, owner’s manuals, graffiti, etc.):
Slade House by
David Mitchell
The Mommy Dearest
Diaries by Rutanya Alda
Communion by Frank
Lauria
Almost Interesting
by David Spade
Night of the
Trilobites by Peter Leslie
Cloud Atlas by
David Mitchell
The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick
Close to Critical
by Hal Clement
Kramer’s War by
Derek Robinson
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the
Christ by Lew Wallace
The Green Man by
Kingsley Amis
Alpha Centauri or Die!
by Leigh Brackett
Frankenstein Unbound
by Brian W. Aldiss
Nightmare Abbey by
Thomas Love Peacock
A shorter-than-usual list this year—I’m a ploddingly slow
reader even with short books, and the ponderous Cloud Atlas and Ben-Hur
slowed me to a crawl this year. Both were wonderful, however. In Ben-Hur, for instance, Wallace offers
this bit of 19th-Century wisdom that the 21st Century
seems to be having a hard time with: “A
certain facility of accommodation in the matter of religion comes to us after
much intercourse with people of different faith; gradually we attain the truth
that every creed is illustrated by good men who are entitled to our respect,
but whom we cannot respect without courtesy to their creed.”
Note to Milla Jovovich:
I know how you feel about me, so if
there’s no review of
Resident Evil: The
Final Chapter on this blog Friday morning, please don’t be hurt: It’s not
because I didn’t want to see it. It’s because the movie wasn’t screened for
critics, at least not here in Phoenix.
All the same, I did watch your
convenient video recap of the series on Youtube,
and greatly appreciated the refresher course.
In Milla’s honor…
Monster-of-the-Week: …this week we acknowledge the
Popokarimu…
…a bioengineered flying abomination from the movie.
